One, Two, Three
| One, Two, Three | |
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Theatrical release poster by Saul Bass
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| Directed by | Billy Wilder |
| Produced by | Billy Wilder |
| Screenplay by |
I. A. L. Diamond Billy Wilder |
| Based on | Egy, kettő, három by Ferenc Molnár |
| Starring | James Cagney Horst Buchholz Pamela Tiffin Arlene Francis |
| Narrated by | James Cagney |
| Music by | André Previn |
| Cinematography | Daniel L. Fapp |
| Edited by | Daniel Mandell |
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Production
company |
The Mirisch Company
Pyramid Productions, A. G. |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
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Release date
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Running time
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104 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English, German, Russian |
| Budget | $3 million |
| Box office | $4 million |
One, Two, Three is a 1961 American comedy film directed by Billy Wilder and written by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond. It is based on the 1929 Hungarian one-act play Egy, kettő, három by Ferenc Molnár, with a "plot borrowed partly from" Ninotchka, a 1939 film co-written by Wilder. The comedy features James Cagney, Horst Buchholz, Lilo Pulver, Pamela Tiffin, Arlene Francis, Leon Askin, Howard St. John, and others. It would be Cagney's last film appearance until Ragtime in 1981, 20 years later.
The film is primarily set in West Berlin during the Cold War, but before the construction of the Berlin Wall, and politics is predominant in the premise. The film is known for its quick pace.
C.R. "Mac" MacNamara is a high-ranking executive in the Coca-Cola Company, assigned to West Berlin after a business fiasco a few years earlier in the Middle East (about which he is still bitter). While based in West Germany for now, Mac is angling to become head of Western European Coca-Cola Operations, based in London. After working on an arrangement to introduce Coke into the Soviet Union, Mac receives a call from his boss, W.P. Hazeltine, in Atlanta. Scarlett Hazeltine, the boss's hot-blooded but slightly dim 17-year-old socialite daughter, is coming to West Berlin. Mac is assigned the unenviable task of taking care of this young whirlwind.
An expected two-week stay develops into two months, and Mac discovers just why Scarlett is enamored of West Berlin: she surprises him by announcing that she's married to Otto Piffl, a young East German Communist with ardent anti-capitalistic views. When the southern belle is confronted about her foolishness in the matter of helping him blow up anti-American "Yankee Go Home" balloons (how the couple met) she simply replies with, "Why, that ain't anti-american, it's anti-yankee... And where I come from, everybody's against the yankees..." Mac tries to come to terms with the fact that he let his boss's daughter marry a communist and learns the horrible truth: The couple are bound for Moscow to make a new life for themselves ("They've assigned us a magnificent apartment, just a short walk from the bathroom!"). Since Hazeltine and his wife are coming to Berlin to collect their daughter the very next day, this is obviously a disaster of monumental proportions, and Mac deals with it as any good capitalist would — by framing the young Communist firebrand and having him picked up by the East German police, using all his wiles, as well as his sexy secretary Fraulein Ingeborg, to get his way. After Otto is forced to listen endlessly to the song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" during interrogation, he cracks and signs a confession that he's an American spy.
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Wikipedia